The WordPress Widgets plugin was released almost a year ago and we have learned a lot in those months: its strengths and weaknesses, its limitations, its quirks. A year is a long time to go without any major upgrades so I hope to deliver the next major version in the next few months.
Leave your comments for Widgets 1.x and your ideas for Widgets 2.0 on this post and I’ll do my best to condense this nebula into a star.
Aaron sent in two widgets that are remarkably similar to some earlier widgets: a widget for Ultimate Tag Warrior and a widget for AdSense. These widgets look great to me.
I wonder how many of these we’ll have in a few more months. The expanding variety of controls and results is nice; there doesn’t have to be a difinitive widget for each purpose. It makes me glad to see more choices and I have a feeling this is an indication that the API is highly learnable.
Still, widget developers, save yourself time when you can. There are a lot of widgets already and most of them are open-source. Word to the wise: search.
Via Leland, we learned about Sabifoo. This isn’t a new widget. It’s a new way to use the RSS Widget.
Nutshell version: send a message from AIM, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, or Google Talk. Sabifoo will create an RSS feed of all the messages it gets from you on that service and you can put the URL in your RSS widget.
This could be a great way to blog links or asides if you don’t mind them not appearing in your archives. There might be a way to navigate older messages; we don’t know.
Technorati Leads Google Leads